Month: September 2012

Mark Vanhoenacker asks:

In terms of balancing America’s most cherished values, no other American memorial marking a terrorist act has struck anything like the "balance" New York has. The Oklahoma City memorial, the Flight 93 memorial, even the Sept. 11 memorial at the Pentagon: None require advance names, photo ID, or airport-style security, let alone all three. The outdoor Oklahoma City memorial—open 24/7 year-round—seems more concerned with helping visitors find nearby doggie daycare than burdening them with byzantine rules and regulations. Abroad, access to highly urban memorials in freedom-loving countries better acquainted with terrorism—Spain, the United Kingdom—is unfettered. Neither the memorial to the London July 7, 2005, attacks nor the Madrid station bombing memorial require preregistration, ID, or security checks.

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Nate Silver gives high praise to meteorologists:

Perhaps the most impressive gains have been in hurricane forecasting.

Just 25 years ago, when the National Hurricane Center tried to predict where a hurricane would hit three days in advance of landfall, it missed by an average of 350 miles. If Hurricane Isaac, which made its unpredictable path through the Gulf of Mexico last month, had occurred in the late 1980s, the center might have projected landfall anywhere from Houston to Tallahassee, canceling untold thousands of business deals, flights and picnics in between — and damaging its reputation when the hurricane zeroed in hundreds of miles away. Now the average miss is only about 100 miles.

Why are weather forecasters succeeding when other predictors fail? It’s because long ago they came to accept the imperfections in their knowledge. That helped them understand that even the most sophisticated computers, combing through seemingly limitless data, are painfully ill equipped to predict something as dynamic as weather all by themselves. So as fields like economics began relying more on Big Data, meteorologists recognized that data on its own isn’t enough.

Kelly Conaboy comments on the above video:

Sometimes the idea you pitch to your boss at the news station is just the perfect idea, and everyone is so proud of you, because they were a little iffy on it when you described it to them but now, seeing it come to fruition like this, they can totally see where you were coming from and how they were just being a little close-minded, but now they see that they were so wrong and you were so right and you are very in tune with what The People What and you seem to enjoy your job as a weatherman and refuse to just rest on your laurels, which is admirable and enviable, really, and we’re all just so proud of you. You really did it. Some people just talk about doing it, but you really did it.

An understandably light day for ads as both presidential candidates abstained from campaigning, but that doesn't mean the day has been politics-free:

Bill Clinton is campaigning in Florida later today for President Obama. It seems unlikely he'll give a full-throated version of the Charlotte convention speech, but it's still a campaign event. The campaigns' ads are down, although strategiests like David Axelrod are engaging on Twitter. Some Republican outside groups are still on the air, as is Richard Mourdock in Indiana. And on television, blocks of time were not carved out by most networks and stations for 9/11 remembrances. All of this would have been hard to imagine even two years ago. There is a sense, even in New York and Washington D.C., that there has been a shift in how the day is treated, one that came after the ten-year mark passed in 2011.

That being said, Rove's dark-money group Crossroads GPS did launch a $2.6 million offensive today against three Democratic Senate candidates: Tim Kaine (VA), Sherrod Brown (OH) and Shelley Berkley (NV). Here is one of the two ads going after Tim Kaine:

And here they hit Shelley Berkley with Medi-scare:

In combination up-ticket and down-ticket news, Paul Ryan is going to run ads in his House race in Wisconsin, possibly to help drive turnout in his district for his upper ticket, as it's unlikely his congressional opponent can win:

Ryan’s opponent in the 1st district is businessman Rob Zerban, who is believed to be a sizable underdog. Ryan is well-known in his district and has a lot more money in his campaign account. According to campaign finance reports filed in late July, he had more than 10 times as much money as Zerban. And a A Public Opinion Strategies poll conducted for Ryan’s campaign on Sunday and Monday showed the incumbent leading Zerban, 58 percent to 33 percent.

Lastly, it turns out that the Planned Parenthood ad we mentioned yesterday is actually part of a record ad buy for PP:

The ad buy, worth $3.2 million, comes as part of the largest-ever campaign effort for Planned Parenthood Votes. The group has already invested $1.4 million on ads in Iowa, Florida and Virginia.

Ad War archive here.

Hoboken, New Jersey, 6.57 am, looking towards Lower Manhattan.

Noah Millman has mixed feelings about the Chicago Teachers' Union strike. He's not a big fan the teacher evaluation system that Emanuel wants:

What’s happened in New York is that the curriculum has been badly distorted by the imperative to teach to the test, an epidemic of cheating has broken out, and some of the most talented teachers have fled the system in frustration. In hindsight, it’s kind of obvious that a heavy-handed command-and-control approach to running a school system produced perverse incentives. That’s just what you would expect in any organization, public or private, that attempted to run everything from the home office.

Earlier, Rick Perlstein argued that lengthening the Chicago school day means teachers are being asked to do "20 percent more work" for "2 percent more pay." This isn't so, according to Dylan Matthews:

The school day is increasing from five hours and forty-five minutes for elementary school and seven hours for high school, to seven and seven and a half hours, respectively. Isn’t an increase in hours of that scale effectively a wage cut, in per-hour terms? Not a big one. Under a deal reached by Emanuel and the Chicago Teachers’ Union in July, almost 500 new teachers will be hired to enable the new schedule, and while high school teachers will have to work another 14 minutes every day, elementary and middle school teachers’ hours won’t change at all. So the overall effect on per-worker hours is minimal.

How long should you delay having sex with a new partner? A new study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family (not available online), pegged the lucky number at 182 days. After the requisite six months of celibacy, women "reported higher levels of satisfaction, commitment, intimacy, emotional support, and sexual satisfaction in the resulting relationship." Amanda Hess dismisses the study and shifts the debate:

Moment of silence for 9/11 at BWI airport interrupted by notice that all liquids must be in clear plastic bag. Daniel Malloy (@ajconwashington) September 11, 2012

Patrick Walsh notes a discrepancy when it comes to acquiring guns in the US:

As a citizen and former soldier, I acknowledge the grim necessity of firearms and their manufacture.  Just as in the days of the Constitutional Convention, the security of a free nation requires a well-regulated military. But making firearms available to the military vastly differs from making them available to a public of over 300 million people. Consider the disparity of the vetting processes. In order for someone to get their hands on a rifle as a Marine, they have to join for several years and undergo thirteen weeks of a famously arduous boot camp. In Pennsylvania, a cursory felony check is all that stands between any 18 year-old and an AR-15 (the civilian version of an M16), unless, of course, the rifle is purchased at a gun show, where no background checks are required.

This ongoing series of news blooper videos is like the sadistic FAIL series but bearable to watch:

Reihan compares Obama to Walter Mondale:

Obama has … left himself with only one option for raising revenue. He will have to raise taxes on high earners to levels far higher than those that prevailed during the Clinton boom. The Obama White House has, for example, championed the idea of curbing tax deductions and credits for over-$250,000 households. Soaking the rich might be a cherished tradition in Democratic politics, but as effective marginal tax rates approach 50 percent, the impact on incentives would be brutal.

The irony is that President Obama might have been better off taking a page from Walter Mondale and forthrightly arguing that universal health coverage and high levels of public investment and a fairer society and a greener environment and everything else Democrats want from government are actually worth paying for – not just by the top 2 percent of the top 1 percent, but by the top 50 percent. The only real alternatives are rolling back the growth of government, Ryan-style, or accepting sluggish growth for years to come.

Well they would simply be the same incentives that Clinton gave them in the 1990s – and we had the longest peace-time expansion. Look: I don't want to pay more taxes. But I do understand that the debt is a looming nightmare we need to start heading off soon. I would like to see Obama embrace a later retirement age and more means-testing for Medicare – but he has at least already cut Medicare (which Ryan is attacking him for), has put entitlements on the table, has unleashed serious cost control experiments in the ACA, backed a debt reduction package which was 2.5:1 spending cuts to tax increases, and is open to wider tax reform … and on revenues, the GOP refuses to offer a single penny.

When they do, we can start talking. How we raise revenues with the least economic harm is a vital discussion. But we cannot have that discussion if, for one side, net revenues are not negotiable.